Unleash the Monkey Army

Momentum, that sense of movement, of continuity of movement (sometimes when we’re stationary but that’s another story), and for a lot of us, the feeling that is missing this year. I’ve been lucky enough to have a go at a couple of truck pulls, scratching child itches that formed from an early age (Geoff Capes and Daley Thompson were childhood heroes) and reflecting on that and some of my other sporting endeavours helps draw out a couple of things which might be helpful in these times. The British readers of this will know the part of the Festive season ritual of sitting down with turkey leftovers or tin of sweets and watching World’s Strongest Man. With the growing popularity of strongman in recent years, others of you may have come across it in different ways.  The vehicle pull (mine are not even close to being in that league by the way) is a staple. It starts with a colossal effort, with every fibre of your being straining to overcome inertia, the “desire” of the object to remain sta

   Recently somebody said to me, in a grateful, good humoured way, “I wouldn’t want your job, you seem like an empathic chap”. Unusually for me, I took that as a compliment, but there are some echoes of other conversations in this which make it slightly disappointing if anything.  We need more human understanding in our world, not less. As long as we see this as something other, we’re missing an opportunity to learn and push on as a species. As Feynman said “Our responsibility is to do what we can, learn what we can, improve the solutions, and pass them on.” Communication skills speak to all of these elements. Like many skills which get labelled as “soft skills”, there is a hard edge, practical utility and commercial benefit to be gained from investing the time in the development of empathy.  Empathy is the skill of understanding, putting yourself in somebody else’s shoes to view the world from their perspective. Where sympathy is a feeling of concern and wanting to see improvement (wh